Choosing the Right Tracking Type

This article goes through the different types of auto-tracking in Cascade and how they're calculated.

Written by Maddy Mirkovic Updated over a week ago

Tracking

Goals in Cascade can be tracked and updated in several different ways. To select the Tracking Type, you’ll need to go to the Goal Hub of the Goal you’d like to track, the icon displaying a jagged arrow will allow you to set your preference. You can choose one of the following options to track each of your Goals.

Manual Tracking: You will manually track and update the progress of the Goal yourself. Its completion will be independent from any of its Sub-Goals. This type of tracking is ideal when the Goal does not have Sub-Goals or Tasks attached, or not all the pieces of work required to complete the Goal added in the system.

Sum of Sub-Goal Completion: This Goal will be tracked automatically by taking the completion of the eligible Sub-Goals and adding them together. A Sub-Goal is “eligible” if it has the same unit (e.g. $) as the parent Goal, therefore the parent Goal must have a unit selected. This type of tracking is ideal for Goals that have Sub-Goals attached that are all of even weight. This is because Sum of Sub-Goal Completion divides the number of Sub-Goals up evenly over the target. If you have some Sub-Goals the are worth more than others, this tracking type won’t track the Goal correctly.

Note that changing the unit of the parent Goal or a Sub-Goal while this method is being used can affect the auto tracking (the user will receive a warning).

Sub-Goal Average: This Goal will be tracked automatically by taking the average completion of the Sub-Goals below it.Example: If the Goal has 4 Sub-Goals, 2 of them are 50% complete and 2 of them are 0% complete, the average completion would be 25%. This type of tracking is ideal for situations where progress of each Sub-Goal is made gradually over time, and you’d like the tracking to reflect this. If you know you won’t complete your Sub-Goals till closer to the end of the time period given, this tracking will still allow your Goals status to reflect the progress you have made on your Sub-Goals, even if they aren’t complete.

Weighted Sub-Goal Average: The Goal will track automatically by taking a weighted average of completion of Sub-Goals when weights have been set for each Sub-Goal.

Goal Weights allow you to set different priorities for your Goals. Goals (or Sub-Goals) with a higher priority will have a bigger impact on the overall completion of a parent Goal than those with lower priorities. When you create each Sub-Goal, you will need to set a weight for each for this tracking to work properly. Once you’ve set a weight for each Sub-Goal an “importance” value will of been given to each. Importance scores define how much a Goal is worth relative to other Goals it is compared against.

This type of tracking is ideal when you have a few Sub-Goals that are of different importance in terms of completing your Goal. Completion of some Sub-Goals may complete the majority of your Goal, while other Sub-Goals may be only a small proportion of the work required to complete your Goal. This tracking can be used to reflect this.

Tasks: The Goal will track automatically by taking the completion of Tasks and adding them together. Tasks should be used for pieces of work required to complete a goal that can either be marked as complete or not complete. They shouldn’t be used for pieces of work that progress over time, this is what Sub-Goals should be used for, as they give you the functionality to track progress.

Goals being tracked by Tasks will simply divide the Goals target by the number of Tasks. Note- Tasks due dates are not accounted for in this type of Tracking.

This type of tracking is ideal for Goals which only have Tasks attached and no Sub-Goals.

In this example, a Goal has three Sub-Goals underneath it, and is set to track using “Sub-Goal Tracking”.

Using non-weighted tracking, the parent Goal’s progress will be calculated to be the average of the three Sub-Goal’s progression. In this case: 50+25+75/300 = 50%.

Turning on Weighted Sub-Goal Tracking will weight each of the Sub Goal’s progression by its importance score, giving a weighted average.

In this example, we can see that the first two Sub-Goals are worth more than the last one, and their progress has been converted into a score based on that importance.

In this case, the main Goal’s progress will be (30 + 15 + 22.5) / (60 + 60 + 30) = approximately 45%, that is, the weighted progress score divided by the total maximum importance scores of the Goal.

Tasks: The Goal will track automatically based on the number of ‘To Do’ and ‘Completed’ tasks associated with it. Example: If the Goal has 10 Tasks, and 8 are marked as ‘Completed’ the Goal would be tracked automatically at 80%.